In 2004, Al Gore, former Vice President and author of Inconvenient Truth, started Generational Investment Management (GIM) to provide funding to businesses associated with alternative energy. GIM also happens to own 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will issue the carbon credits that Cap and Tax legislation is based upon.

In 2007, Al Gore became a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiman, Perkins, Claufield and Byers (KPCB). This firm is heavily invested in renewable energy and electrical grid improvements. The market for their products is almost completely dependent on government programs in the form of subsidies, tax breaks or regulation. Al Gore’s contribution to KPCB is to promote government intervention into the energy markets.

It is not surprising that venture capital firms and investment firms that will have a stake in the trading of carbon credits, have made extensive campaign contributions to those legislators proposing Cap and Trade legislation. Clearly, the American public looses in the form of higher energy costs and lost jobs however, a few politically well connected individuals will have much to gain as the result of further government regulation of energy consumption.

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the earth …

Al: Yeah.

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius … The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

The Story of Algore, from Modern Cautionary Tales:

Once upon a time there was a tyrant named Algore. He was a rich man, but he felt he could never be rich enough, so he took more and more from the people he ruled over until they were very poor and miserable. He made them hand over whatever they possessed willingly, by telling them that if they didn’t, the seas would boil up and flood the land and drown them all. They believed him because he told them that Science proved he was right, and all the people had a great reverence for Science. Secretly, Algore bribed as many scientists as he could to say that what he said was scientific fact. The few scientists who refused to lie for him were frightened into silence by the tyrant’s teams of Mockers and Vilifiers. So the people were convinced that the only way they could survive was to do as Algore said.

They stopped heating their houses in winter, and many perished from the cold. They stopped eating what they liked and tried to keep alive on a diet of raw roots, and many died of hunger. They became parched because Algore allowed them very little water, and many died of thirst. Algore allowed them very little light in the long nights of winter and the short nights of summer, and many died of sheer sadness and boredom.

Almost every family had once possessed a motor car, but Algore got his scientists to say that motor cars were hastening the boiling of the seas. They had had money to pay for flights in airplanes, but the scientists told them that flying hastened the boiling of the seas. So they gave up driving and flying and only went to places they could walk to, and many died of exhaustion.

Some of them tried secretly to use coal to warm themselves and cook hearty meals, and oil to fuel cars and airplanes. But they were always caught and punished. Many such ‘selfish saboteurs’ were executed for the ‘worst of crimes’ – hastening the boiling of the seas.

‘Where can we get some power from, to light our houses, to cook our food?’ some brave voices from among the dwindling population dared to ask the tyrant.

‘From the windmills I have given you,’ Algore deigned to reply.

The people stood gazing up at the humming windmills, waiting for a breeze to turn them so that a tiny bit of power might be made, to give them a tiny bit of light and warmth. Breezes arose, the windmills stirred, but there was never enough power to save them from hunger and cold.

They fell on their knees and begged Algore to save them.

‘Very well,’ said Algore loftily. ‘I will let you use a little oil, a little coal. You may warm your houses, cook your food, drive your cars, even fly in airplanes, if you will pay me for granting you permission each time you do it.’

In that way, Algore took every last thing from the people, down to the last coin the hardest worker had worked for.

Algore was now very rich indeed. He grew very fat and smooth. Day and night he chuckled in his warm, brightly lit palace over how clever he had been to cheat the people out of everything they had worked for. He boasted to the scientists he had bought, and to his henchmen of Mockers and Vilifiers (and their henchwives), and to silly foreign admirers who gave him prizes for being the Prophet of the Boiling Seas, about how powerful he was.

He had come to believe the story he had made up. He thought he had only to say something and it would be true. So one day he said to the cold, hungry, miserable remnant of the people that he had thought of a new way to give them light and heat, without waiting for a wind to turn the windmills.

‘We will siphon up the heat from the molten centre of the earth,’ he announced. ‘Down there the temperature is millions of degrees, measured in either Celsius or Fahrenheit.’

But even among the remnant of the people there were some who knew this wasn’t true, and for the first time they began to doubt that Algore knew anything about Science at all. Even his tame scientists could not bring themselves to say that the centre of the earth was millions of degrees hot, and some of them hung their heads and covered their mouths in shame. ‘We let him go too far,’ they said.

But it was too late for regrets. Most of the people he had ruled over had perished, the land was dried up, the fields were gone to dust, the houses had crumbled, the cities were empty, and the cold sea lapped on the shore as it always had and always will.